(courtesy YouTube (c) AppleTV+)
————— SPOILERS AHEAD !!!!! —————
If there’s one thing Constellation is, it’s fiendishly, mind-bogglingly involved.
It’s also darkly and richly poetic, character-rich and trippy as absolute hell but involved … and complicated … and full on to the point where multiple instances of pausing are needed to make sense of what’s going on and more importantly, where it’s going on and to whom.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing because this eight-episode series – read the review of episodes 1 through 4 – is well written and produced, but it’s not the sort of show you can kick back and watch while you multitask.
That’s pretty true of the current sci-fi shows on AppleTV+, all of which demand you pay attention, not simply to the narrative shifts, but also to character interactions which have so much embedded above, below and in the dialogue that there’s not a single conversation that simply an exchange of words.
Everything comes loaded and in a multiversal story where realities have collided and merged and the people in the midst of all this messy entanglement are finding sorting it out to take everything they have – it’s amazing how quickly you pick up a rudimentary grasp of quantum physics; the key thing to keep in mind throughout Constellation is it is possible for an object or person to exist in two states simultaneously and for them to affect one another, with one usually having a greater influence – you have to really, REALLY, pay attention.
Having said that, there’s a huge amount of very relatable humanity at play here, and while there are times where you have to stop and mentally recap and reassemble who is who and when and what, and that’s thanks to some very fine writing which, while it delivers up fantastically intense action scenes and wildly imaginative twists and turns, always remembers there are people at the heart of this impressively complicated tale.
Specifically astronaut Johanna “Jo” Ericsson (Noomi Rapace) who makes it back to Earth by the skin of teeth after an explosion on the International Space Station only to find that her reality has been subtlely and insidiously turned on its head.
While she is ostenibly still married to the same man, Magnus Taylor (James D’Arcy) and has the same daughter Alice (Davina Coleman and Rosie Coleman), small things are off like the colour of the car, where the mugs are in the kitchen and even how Alice smells – tellingly, this Alice can’t speak Swedish while Jo’s actual Alice back over the multiversal divide, was bilingual – and as Constellation progresses in ways epically big and intimately small, these tiny differences build and build until they are craters in Jo’s perception of reality.
Being a smart and brilliantly intuitive woman, Jo works out, as does Alice that two realities have merged into one, and that they need to find a way to get everyone back where they belong before something else going horribly and terribly wrong like, well, Jo losing her mind.
Oops, too late!
The thing is though that while Jo appears to have lost her grip on reality, the truth is that reality has lost its grip on her, and while her husband and co-workers thinks she is suffering from a psychosis apparently common to astronauts who have returned from space, it’s Jo who’s onto the truth of what’s happening.
And she’s not the only one affected.
Henry Caldera (Jonathan Banks) aka Bud Caldera depending on the reality is the man behind the experiment known as CAL that has royally the previously set parameters of reality.
Well, in one reality at least; in the other, he’s a washed-up ex-astronaut who never got over the death of his fellow Apollo 18 mission mates; by way of contrast, this never happened in the reality the living Jo is from (in the reality she’s occupying now, she dies and living JO is catapulted across ruptured spatial barriers in to take her place), something that mightily f**ks over the mind of Jo’s commander Paul Lancaster (William Catlett) who, like Jo, is alive in one reality and quite dead in the other.
See what we mean about having to have your viewer wits about you?
But what really stamps Constellation as something rather special and rather flawlessly executed is that in the middle of all this quantum cleverness, there remains a narrative accessibility but also importantly for the show, a keen focus on the people caught up in these extraordinary circumstances.
That matters because all the whiz-bang multiversal smarts won’t matter one bit if it’s just all just clever ideas and intriguingly complex twists and turns; we have to care about the people affected by them if a show like Constellation is going to mean anything beyond the frighteningly temporary streaming short-term and by the end we really do.
Key to all the emotional impact the show has is Jo and her daughter Alice; with certain events making it impossible for now for Jo to return to her home reality and the two Calderas trapped in entirely the wrong places, they both have to make peace with the fact that neither has the person they want in their life.
Alice’s real mother is dead while Jo’s actual Alice, the one who speaks Swedish, is across a now uncrossable divide, and no amount of wishing and hoping is going to change that.
Sure, it seems possible to talk across the divide, though even that seems challenged by season’s end, but crossing it will require some major machinations to take place, and so, after four incredibly intense and highly emotional episodes where the tenacity and resilience of all the major character but particularly Jo and Alice are tested to the limits, everyone who’s in the know has to make their peace with the fact that the mixed reality they have now is the one they’re stuck with.
For now, at least; you can only hope that a second season of Constellation will be commissioned with showrunner Peter Harness having plenty of ideas about where it all go next.
Constellation streams on AppeTV+